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TAIYE SELASI / Ghana Must Go

Wednesday, March 20, 2013 - 7:30pm

Body:

Kweku Sai is dead. A renowned surgeon and failed husband, he succumbs
suddenly at dawn outside his home in suburban Accra. The news of Kweku’s death
sends a ripple around the world, bringing together the family he abandoned
years before. Ghana Must Go is their story. Electric, exhilarating, beautifully
crafted, it is a testament to the transformative power of unconditional love,
from a debut novelist of extraordinary talent.

Moving with great elegance through time and place, Selasti charts the Sais’
circuitous journey to one another. In the wake of Kweku’s death, his children
gather in Ghana at their enigmatic mother’s new home. The eldest son and his
wife; the mysterious, beautiful twins; the baby sister, now a young woman: each
carries secrets of their own. What is revealed in their coming together is the
story of how they came apart: the hearts broken, the lies told, the crimes
committed in the name of love. Splintered, alone, each navigates his pain,
believing that what has been lost can never be recovered -- until, in Ghana, a
new way forward, a new family, begins to emerge.

“Selasi does more than
merely renew our sense of the African novel: she renews our sense of the novel,
period. An astonishing debut." -- Teju Cole, author of Open City"Gorgeous. Reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri but with even greater warmth and
vibrancy, Selasi’s novel, driven by her eloquent prose, tells the powerful
story of a family discovering that what once held them together could make them
whole again."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred
review)

Taiye
Selasiwas born in London and
raised in Massachusetts. She holds a B.A. in American studies from Yale and an
M.Phil. in international relations from Oxford. “The Sex Lives of African
Girls” (Granta, 2011), Selasi’s
fiction debut, will appear in Best American
Short Stories2012.
She lives in Rome.